Hiroshima's tragic legacy a reminder of potential dangers of today's no-limits technologies

When you stand in its skeletal shadow, it is hard not to be moved by the silence and utter serenity of the Genbaku Dome. 

Originally built as an industrial product exhibition hall near the beginning of the last century, it was one of the only buildings in Hiroshima to partially survive the world's first atomic bombing.

Hiroshima city council, in the postwar years, debated long and hard whether to demolish the structure that was, for many survivors of the attack, a visceral reminder of the horrors they had endured both during and following the explosion which ushered in the nuclear age.

The decision to keep it, preserve its ruins and add a lush, green memorial park to embrace the site turned the dome into a potent anti-war symbol, a forceful plea for denuclearization.

Japanese Prime Minister Fumeo Kishida wanted his fellow G7 leaders to soak in that message along with the silence last Friday. 

And they did.

"Most of us don't remember a time when the world was under threat of nuclear war," said Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. "The Cold War ended a long time ago and the danger of nuclear war is unfortunately being forgotten by many."

There is, however, another lesson, an under-appreciated one, that Barack Obama touched upon in remarks back in 2016 when he became the first sitting U.S. president to visit Hiroshima. He said there are many memorials around the world that tell stories of courage and heroism and others, such as Auschwitz, that deliver an "echo of unspeakable depravity."

What the Genbaku Dome and the great mushroom cloud that rose above it on Aug. 6, 1945 represented was something quite different from the other monuments, Obama said. It spoke to "humanity's core contradiction" — that our creativity, our imagination and ability to bend nature to our will could also lead to our own destruction.

In the immediate aftermath of the bombing, carried out by the B-29 bomber named the Enola Gay, the U.S. Army Air Force was left to wonder, as co-pilot Capt. Robert Lewis later confided to his journal: "My God, what have we done?"

With Russia's nuclear threats over Ukraine, the fraying of decades-old arms control treaties and China's refusal to accept nuclear weapons limitations, it's easy to focus the mind on the what-might-be series of scenarios of the moment.

The arrival of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy at the G7 summit on Saturday only served to underscore fears that the world could be spiralling uncontrolled toward some kind of nuclear confrontation — be it big or small. 

What passed virtually unnoticed as journalists, officials and some leaders huddled around television monitors to watch the pool feed — and endless reruns — of Zelenskyy's plane landing on Saturday was the somewhat dry, tentative steps taken by the world's leading democracies toward addressing what some have described as even greater existential crisis: the rise of the machines through artificial intelligence (AI).   

The G7 called for the adoption of technical standards to keep artificial intelligence "trustworthy." Warnings that governance of the technology has not kept pace with its growth have grown deafening, both inside and outside the tech community.